Yahoo Pulls the Plug On GeoCities 427
Mike writes "It's official: Yahoo is pulling the plug, and GeoCities is dead. GeoCities had suffered a long and drawn-out battle with its health over the past decade. An antiquated service model and outdated technology are widely blamed for the struggle. An official cause of death, however, has yet to be determined. Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to its demise. GeoCities was 15 years old." There is doubtless a lot of funny and informative stuff on there that's worth saving (not just Jesux, which pudge has now migrated). If some of it belongs to you, perhaps you should move it sometime in the next few months. Update: 04/24 18:10 GMT by T : And if you know some GeoCities page owners who aren't especially computer savvy, you could point out to them how easy it is to slurp down their pages for re-hosting elsewhere.
RIP (Score:5, Funny)
RIP Geocities, the Friendster of the 90's generation.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd agree with the awful .gif's and styles, but they had a lot more going for them than myspace.
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff. Many times over the last decade I've ended up on a Geocities website when researching particular subjects (sorry - can't give any examples, but more than a couple dozen times when looking at some obscure stuff).
This is sad, but bound to happen. For a long while Geocities was the only place hobbyists could spew their knowledge. Now it's all over the place. Hopefully the internet archive can hold on to some of those soon-to-be lost gems.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
VF Designer [geocities.com]
Unfortunately the pain isn't limited to geocities... more pain here [dokimos.org].
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I used to have a friend who'd clean up after royal events and sift through vomit and random foodstuff and find diamond rings and £10 notes.
I, personally, used to rummage around a funfair ball-pit and find mobile phones, money, jewelery and other fun tidbits.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
Gotta throw a warning up next time.
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What, this link: http://www.dokimos.org/ajff/ [dokimos.org] ?
That's not too bad, really. A bit overboard on the accept Jesus graphic, but white text quoting a couple Bible verses, on a black background, with a door and a cat doing a single animation sequence, that's not so bad.
Oh, you mean what it must look like UNFILTERED! [Bypass privoxy with my light text on dark background enforcement filter that kills background images, turn on scripting, toggle animation from once to enabled, refresh.]
OK, NOW I see what you mean!
Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
Re:RIP (Score:4, Informative)
This [geocities.com] was in my browser history.
Bit outdated, but indicative of the fact that useful stuff resides on geocities.
Oh, just remembered zx32 [geocities.com] which I used to use back in my Windows days.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's where everyone neglects the fact that Geoshitties was a huge lead-up to the blog.
People with no interest in html, css, hosting, dns, etc. want to brain-dump on the intarwebs too. Geocities did it first, now you go start a blog.
Re:RIP .. server side includes (Score:3, Interesting)
Geocities was a progression for me as they later allowed SSI. This moved me over from frame based layout. From there I quickly hopped over to my own domain with PHP and was totally geeked out with include_once()!
I went back to the site and added meta-redirect to forward people to my blog. Must check my server logs and see if anyone comes that way.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately like all good resources, diamonds in the rough. You have to wade through so much shit that you end up almost giving up. Almost... then you find the gem, and cherish it.
While it is sad to see it gone, the horrid gaudy gif sites will not be missed.
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They made a TOS change somewhere back in the distant past that resulted in my pulling down most of my info from my spot in TheTropics.
http://web.archive.org/web/19990128020615/www.geocities.com/TheTropics/1298/ [archive.org]
I don't remember the details at this time.
drew
Re:RIP (Score:5, Informative)
Geocities had a lot of content. A huge amount of useful information. Especially the pre-Yahoo stuff.
Yes. For example websites devoted to the internals of GW-Basic. I don't write new programs in it, but I still convert old programs written in it. Also, the early versions of G77 for Windows are there plus documentation plus collections of compiled libraries.
A bigger bite is for those of us whose ISPs were the baby Bells. I still have an old web page that is essentially prodigy. 15 MB limit, one level, browser based updating and file creation, but it's ad free and still there. More recent customers found their personal web pages are hosted on Geocities, complete with their icky ad overlays.
Yahoo managed to crap up the e-mail side too, when they migrated their customers to "Yahoo mail". I pay for e-mail as part of my internet access. If I want to read e-mail on the web, it comes with ads.
So I'm not entirely sorry that Geocities is going away. And as bad as AT&T and Yahoo are, both are far better than the local cable company.
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I learned HTML from Geocities.
With earnest and a renewed sense of nostalgia, RIP Geocities.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:RIP (Score:5, Funny)
folks with high speed Internet connections that fill our tubes with spam because the moron will click on ANYTHING that has the words "tits" or "lesbos" in it,it truly is a different world now.
Your tits and lesbos link seems to be broken. You owe me a new mouse.
Re:RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent isn't /funny/. He's being dead serious, that's how it was back in the late '90s.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Earthlink? AOL? "...the late '90s"? Where the fuck were you in 1990 when I was downloading pr0n from a Usenet dialup BBS? Huh?
According to Wikipedia, fount of all human knowledge, GeoCities was created in late 1994, so what you may have been doing in 1990 has no bearing on this discussion.
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good memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:good memories (Score:5, Funny)
Propping up a camera?
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I think you need to work on your technique of first impressions... :)
The Neighborhoods (Score:5, Interesting)
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Realm/TimesSquare/4350 bay-bee.
The original site of Kramerica Industries. Or something like that. And then there was another page of the animated gif of the guy walking, stops and pees, but tiled on the background with no text. The early internet was the best.
Re: (Score:2)
AWWW... I forgot about that! [nostalgia sets in]
I cut my teeth on html using Geoshitties, 'round 97. What a mess, but god bless the free tinkering space.
Re:The Neighborhoods (Score:5, Interesting)
I had SiliconVally/8043 over a decade ago. Even back then it bothered me that they didn't really do much with the Neighborhood concept other than to categorize sites. I always thought it could have been something that allowed people to network and find others with similar tastes and ideas. Basically a poor-man's version of social networking sites that are all the rage today.
I've got to be getting old, there were so many really good ideas back then that got about 90% of the way towards the major Internet trends that we see today only to completely fall over into obscurity well before their time.
I used to have a copy of the Internet Yellow Pages. A physical book. The same size and shape as a telephone yellow-pages. At the time it was printed, it listed most of the relevant sites devoted to a particular subject and it was actually pretty darn thorough. Most of the URLs back then were .edu, .gov, or .net. Only a few .com and almost no .org. There were a few entries for FTP and Gopher sites scattered here and there as well. Good times. I wonder if I still have that book stashed away somewhere, the Internet was such an incredibly different place back then.
Re:The Neighborhoods (Score:5, Interesting)
Advertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't remember much about Geocities, but I do remember that I absolutely HATED having their advertisements on my page.
It's funny, though, if you look at MySpace or Facebook now they're absolutely cluttered with flashy, obtrusive advertisements and I don't give it much thought. Guess it goes to show, you can get used to anything.
An old saying... (Score:4, Funny)
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
Prodigy tried the flashy nasty ad thing before AOL and was pulverized for it. AOL made a whole business plan around it.
Speak for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Speak for yourself (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the band's fault if their MySpace/Facebook page doesn't have any good information, tour dates, or anything else that might be useful.
I've seend plenty of excellent band pages. Unfortunately, the sucky ones outweigh the good ones, but don't blame MySpace.
(There's plenty of other things to hate MySpace for.)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say Myspace has been a great thing for local bands. It's extremely easy to hear a few of their songs and sample their music, and it's also extremely easy to see when they'll be playing a show and where.
Myspace isn't really designed for them to hold a long boring biography or a history of their tour dates. It also doesn't have a nice section for them to sell their merchandise either like t-shirts and cd's. Also a forum / message board is missing for fans to talk with each other.
I think myspace is more
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Myspace has been very good for checking out a friend's recommendation before buying a CD. The samples bands put up are way better than the 30s clips from Amazon.com. The rest is just wasted bandwidth. Facebook is very good for keeping in touch with people in other ways, if you have a set of friends that use it like that and aren't mindlessly throwing sheep at you, etc.
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Some of the bands that I've recently discovered only announce their gigs by posting it on their myspace page, where it quickly gets obliterated by the 'thanks for the add! xoxox' crap. Even worse, some have the bizarre practice of announcing their gigs to people only on their friends list :/
Eugh.
Re:Advertisement (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't remember much about Geocities, but I do remember that I absolutely HATED having their advertisements on my page.
An old trick we used back in the day was to open a noscript tag, but not close it. This kept all the ads from showing up. Of course you couldn't run javascript on it from there, but in 1998, who cared.
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More likely, you're just using Adblock like most Slashdotters and never even see them.
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Having never seen an advertisement on FB, I was wondering what the hell the original post was talking about on Facebook. Your mention of AdBlock clears it up though, thanks AdBlock!
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More likely, you're just using Adblock like most Slashdotters and never even see them.
By odds, sure. All I use though is Flashblock and disabling just annoying javascript features not the whole thing, basically the stuff that can actually get in my way but leaving whatever degree of visually obtrusive ads remain. I can really just block them out 99% of the time, not even registering them. Largely from browsing the web in that time before enlightened browsers, but after animated gifs.
I remember reading on
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The Geocities ads were why I started running the Proxomitron as my ad filter in the first place. Amazingly, even without updates it's gotten more effective over time: since its Javascript ad filter is fairly broad, and everyone uses Javascript to serve ads these days, I couldn't tell you how much advertising the typical Myspacer or Facebook page has.
(I couldn't have used AdBlock instead: this predates Phoenix itself, much less the addons that have made it popular.)
Meh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
For all the griping people do.. it wasn't that bad
And it's visual design tool really was amazing.
Users didn't need to worry about arranging stuff into tables.. you could just drag your graphic where ever you wanted .. or put text anywhere.. etc.
Sure, it let a lot of garbage leak onto the Internet.. but it also let people with something interesting to contribute an easy way of doing so.
And lets face it.. was the output of a geocities website designed with the visual designer that much different than most of the myspace pages you see? (that isn't an endorsement for myspace..). If you have interesting content.. the design matters a lot less (and again.. not saying that myspace contains interesting content).
Re: (Score:2)
Geocities is still the number 2 search result on Google if you do a search for "free web page"
Re:Meh.. (Score:4, Interesting)
If I had to write Geocities eulogy, it would be: "Geocities paved the way for Web 2.0"
Take from that what you will, a lot of web 2.0 was "Hey! Look at me!" type crap that we equate with myspace, youtube, and Web 2.0, it was the original place where someone could contribute to the internet for free.
Too Bad (Score:5, Interesting)
As somebody who learned HTML and Javascript with GeoCities, that's really too bad. Yes, GeoCities is the home of the stereotypical mid 90's "home page" with animated gifs and background MIDI music but I still occasionally come across very worthwhile information on GeoCities via Google and in terms of reliable free hosting with pretty unobtrusive ads it was pretty good. It seems somewhat rash to just shut it down outright.
I wonder if there isn't some way they could just take a snapshot of the domain as it is right now, and then keep that online. Give site owners the ability to delete their site, but no longer allow editing or uploading. That would be pretty low maintenance and certainly they still receive ad revenue from it, but maybe not enough to cover costs.
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I think most interesting Geocities pages are already backed up to http://web.archive.org/ [archive.org]
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XOOM (Score:2)
I had my first website on XOOM, anybody remember them? Yes the company that tried to make a living by selling clip art and animated gifs. Unfortunately they always had a robots.txt file that denied web crawlers access to members.xoom.com which means everybody, including me, who had a website on XOOM wasn't archived by the wayback machine. :(
They were eventually partnered or bought by NBC to have iNBC.com of which died within soon after without warning and everything was lost. Well if you can even call it a
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In my experiance the wayback machine only archives stuff beyond a certain level of popularity and sometimes it gets the homepage but not the important stuff e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20071002152623/http://www.geocities.com/vampyrdarla/frame.htm [archive.org] has the homepage but none of the pages with the real information.
I've tried to provoke it into collecting the rest of the site on the next run. I'm also trying to archive it locally but it seems my recursive wget has triggered service temporerally unavilible er
hmm. familiar (Score:5, Funny)
"Awful, eye-punishing graphics, lack of relevancy, and 'lowest-common-denominator design' are believed to have contributed to it's demise."
Sounds like myspace
Re:hmm. familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Progress? (Score:5, Funny)
GeoCities:
Learn HTML, post Animated Gifs, Blare Midis
MySpace:
post Animated Gifs, Blare Mp3s
YouTube:
Blare "Animated" Videos with Sound
Twitter:
Blare
Re:Progress? (Score:5, Funny)
good riddance to bad rubbish (Score:5, Interesting)
i hosted my first website, a WW II history site, on geocities - before the ad requirements got out of hand. when their ads got completely obnoxious, i asked for a way to keep the ad in a top frame, or any way to keep it from covering my content, but was told to pony up cash.
random ads over WW II pictures, especially some of the pictures of fallen soldiers I had up, didn't sit well with me - so I ponied up cash for a real webhost, and didn't look back.
perhaps i'm just too good at holding a grudge, but i'm glad they're dead.
Re:good riddance to bad rubbish (Score:5, Funny)
especially some of the pictures of fallen soldiers I had up, didn't sit well with me...perhaps i'm just too good at holding a grudge, but i'm glad they're dead.
The beauty of context.
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*cringe*
that's some pretty awful englishfail.
oh, that button below says "preview," not "impatiently wait for submit button to appear." now i get it.
Well, netcraft stats (Score:2)
Wow, MS must like it when ever someone running a lot of *nix(FreeBSD) servers switches to Windows or in this case, drops out. Now they can report being more successful because they own a larger percentage of websites.
First members.aol.com and now this (Score:2, Funny)
Where will we go for our fix of lousy, horribly formatted websites from 1997?
I feel bad for this sucker [peopleconnectionblog.com]:
WHAT A SHAMBLES & A POOR SHOW. NO ONE WANTS TO KNOW EITHER. FORTUNATELY I SAVED MY WEBPAGE & TRANSFERRED IT TO GEOCITIES.
Link Here: http ://geocities.yahoo.com/v/gcp_choose/
Real easy to do a simple webpage. With more time I think this could be better than aol.
Yahoo business acumen? (Score:2)
Re:Yahoo business acumen? (Score:5, Funny)
You slashdotted Geocities! Most impressive!
While most here are going to rag on Geocities ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason we cann all remember Geocities was because there was neat stuff on it!!! Geocities was home to all the quirky people who had all sorts of goodies to post on the web, and no other means to do so.
Re:While most here are going to rag on Geocities . (Score:5, Insightful)
Ain't it the truth. Geocities attracted some of the most eye-gougingly terrible amateur designs, but shit, a lot of those people went on to lose the colorblindness, but kept the technical know-how they gained with their first little hobby site. I certainly did.
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Totally. My original websites are (mercifully) lost to the void, but I learned a WHOLE lot through trial and error in those GeoCities days.
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Not to mention the fact that back then the web was NEW to so many people! Shiny, fascinating and NEW! I had a page that listed my comic art collection. Many of the guy's fans contacted me thanking me for it. I became obsessed with tracking down and documenting EVERY, SINGLE, SOLITARY thing that he'd ever had published. The artist actually contacted me and asked if he could mirror it on his site when he got one a couple of years later. He actually said that he didn't remember half of the items on the list.
An
Jesusx (Score:2)
First time I've ever heard of it. Interesting, and definitely unique... I never would've thought of such a thing as a "Christian" based OS. I wonder if they ever got it off the ground.
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I was there when GeoCities was acquired (Score:5, Funny)
Making a backup (Score:2)
If like me you want to make a backup of your site but only had the free account sans FTP httrack [httrack.com] may be useful.
This Comment Is Still Under Construction (Score:5, Funny)
<blink>This Comment Is Still Under Construction</blink>
(yes, even after 15 years)
And this is a spinning GIF logo. Your browser is just too tasteful to display it.
Anyone have a suggestion where to go next? (Score:3)
Re:Anyone have a suggestion where to go next? (Score:4, Informative)
Free? As in beer? What do you want, another Geocities?
Try Dreamhost. Not free, but totally not-sucky for the price, IMHO. Includes a Linux shell, if you're into that sort of thing, and a fair bit of space that you can use for backups of your own files.
Been with them for years; still getting used to the whole "buy now, we bill you, and then you pay your bill sometime later" philosophy, which seems to be totally lacking in this field.
(Note to mods: I'd be spamming if I posted a referral link to Dreamhost. I, however, did no such thing.)
Re:Anyone have a suggestion where to go next? (Score:4, Informative)
nearlyfreespeech.net [nearlyfreespeech.net]. It's not free, but it costs only pennies and you don't have to endure any garbage. You get CGI in all sorts of nice functional languages, shell script access, and nice tools.
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I felt a great disturbance in the force (Score:5, Funny)
As if millions of internet web pages suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened....
Wow (Score:2)
Every time I see the word "Geocities" I'm shocked that it's still around. I guess that's over now.
The "GeoCities" name (Score:2)
My first web page (Score:2)
If you build it, they will come... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it over already? (Score:2)
Sorry, Service Temporarily Unavailable. The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Please check the URL for proper spelling and capitalization. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Yahoo!, try visiting the Yahoo! home page
Back in the Day... (Score:5, Interesting)
...I ran a Pokemon fansite on Geocities which offered midis of the game's music, tips (really just reading Tips&Tricks and putting it on my site, kind of like blogs), information on the different versions and ROMs of the Gameboy games. I got my first Cease and Desist letter, ever, from Nintendo. Because of my Geocities site.
Geocities, you will forever be in my heart.
It's were we learned how the internet works. (Score:5, Interesting)
Who cares about the ugly designs? They were "ugly" because people actually had the freedom to upload whatever they wanted, and who goes to the internet to watch "pretty" things anyway, especially 15 years ago, when you couldn't find 2 browsers that would show a page the same way?
For the younger generation (I was 13), who hadn't been to college, we only had a dial-up connection and no way to know about ftp, gopher, usenet, etc; geocities gave us a way to experiment and learn how the internet worked.
Today everything is trapped inside something else (facebook, myspace, blogging platforms, news sites), does anyone understand what happens with their data after they publish it? where does it go, where does it come from when it shows up on their browser?
I need more time! (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:It hurts me inside (Score:4, Funny)
Re:It hurts me inside (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years. I'd say there's very little chance Facebook is. And I'd say there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that Twitter is around in 5 years, never mind 10.
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Re:It hurts me inside (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It hurts me inside (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say there's a good chance Google will still be around in 10 years.
You know what, 10 years ago, I'd have said that there'd be a good chance that AltaVista will still be around in 10 Years!
If you don't know what AltaVista is then you might want to Google it. 10 years ago, you'd likely have AltaVista'd Google to find out what Google was!
AltaVista is still around but it's a subsidiary of Google. I'm not saying that Google won't be around in 10 years... I'm just saying that 10 years is a long time in Internet time!
Talking of which, does anyone else remember Internet Time [wikipedia.org]?
Re:It hurts me inside (Score:5, Funny)
Luckily for us, I think we will still have the real Arnold Schwarzenegger for defense, and if not, we will always have digitized CGI models of him to wage binary wars on the new GooMartBucksWangCletusPlane superstructure....
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Ah, but do you remember AltaVista before they bought the altavista.com domain name? It used to be altavista.digital.com! Of course DEC became Compaq which became HP, and as others have corrected you, Yahoo! now owns AltaVista.
Re:Value (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know, when researching some really really old file formats for some old games, I found that a lot of documentation for them was held on sites like geocities, long since forgotten about and destined to be lost if Yahoo just pulls the plug completely. No doubt there's a fair amount of information littered over the service amidst all of the Frontpage 97 templated gif-fests.
At the very least, they should let archive.org or something back the whole damn thing up, it may have been a rubbish service, but it's still an important part of internet history.
That and they'd actually be able to supply some decent bandwidth to the things.
Re:Value (Score:5, Interesting)
And nothing of value was lost.
Something of great value was lost!
Unfortunately it was lost long ago.
I remember the original Geocities... well before Yahoo bought them out. It was a thriving community of Internet users, the kind of people that had Internet access but didn't have web space, or their own server to host pages.
If you can't remember a Geocities before Yahoo! then please think twice before dismissing it.
If it wasn't for Geocities, I probably wouldn't be a Web Developer now. I used to code up pages on my ageing 8086 (without a graphical web browser, so I had no way of testing), I used to take the HTML files into college which had computers powerful enough to run Netscape. After a bit of debugging, I'd upload them to Geocities and they were live!
Sure, some people had nice web servers that their companies paid for, but I couldn't afford that, I just had my college's 1KB/sec Internet connection and my free Geocities account. It served me well!
I'll miss Geocities.
I'll also miss every other service that Yahoo! butchered too! Anyone remember the original Rocketmail, OneList? WebRing? Launch.com? All Seeing Eye?
All great services ruined by Yahoo!
I still use Flickr, but I worry for its future. Yahoo! have a bad history!
Last but not least...
RIP Geocities. You served me well! It's a pity Yahoo! murdered you!
Re:Value (Score:5, Interesting)
You were using an 8086 then? You could probably have fished a perfectly usable 286 or 386 machine out of a hospital dumpster for free, or bought such a computer for dirt cheap. I even had a 486sx/33 chip my rich (yet not pretentious) friend handed down to me around the time GC was born, though it took me a few months to get the rest of the components.
That's cool you were doing that and remember all that stuff! I remember using NCSA mosaic in 16-color windows 3.11, and how cool the beta netscape was. And before then I was serious into BBS's.
In fact, it was because of geocities that I came up with a nifty "hosting" service (namebooster.com, now owned by some squatter) that would allow you to have a domain name, and have it take you to a painfully long geocities URL. At first I did it in cgi, but then I learned apache rewrite rules that made it easier to manage. I didn't really make any money off of that, but it did open the door to some crazy adventures I encountered shortly after during the .com boom.
Re:The ruins of the old Internet (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as people are bashing Geocities, consider*:
* This is going from memory, 14 years ago now.
I don't mind saying I had a GeoCities page, for several years from 1995 on. It wasn't much, but it was mine. I edited it in the college labs (faster than dialup, and free!) and shared it with friends and family from their home computers. Times were good.
Of course, I also used tables and transparent GIFs for layout; there was no CSS back then. And pay-per-minute dial-up was lousy. And there was no Google (remember having to use different search engines for different topics? I remember preferring AltaVista.) No Wikipedia, either -- Encarta was great, though. (Which reminds me, farewell, Encarta. You helped me through many a paper.)
Great; now I'm feeling nostalgic. Does anyone remember canyon.mid? [youtube.com] Man, I used to listen to that all the time. Of course, then I discovered Impulse Tracker, [wikipedia.org] and realized that MIDI was crap (except perhaps as a control language for devices.)